Staggering Behaviour

On Saturday night, I should have been drunk. I should have been riding a Tesco trolley chariot bedecked with a traffic cone helmet. I should have been laughing at a friend fending off the advances of a creaky stripper with hernia-inducing alacrity. But I wasn't.

I wasn't indulging in any such cliche because, although I was on a stag night for a very dear friend of mine, I wasn't having very much fun at all.

Stag nights, that last bastion of debauched overindulgence and questionable moral behaviour, blurring the line between manly bonding and legal perversion, can go one of two ways - they either fizzle out in a blaze of nudity and men taking turns to roast a crumpet between the stag's goose-pimpled buttocks, or fizzle out in a whimper of yawns and muffled excuses.

This one, for all the valiant intent of the best man and self-imposed fiscal constraints of the groom, was unequivocally the latter. For in the space of sixteen measly, unchallenging hours, our party went from twenty-five, to just seven willing souls, two of whom were very much over the age where mailing someone to John O'Groats with their VISA card cellotaped to their back is still funny.

The sad, depressing fact is that eighteen supposed 'mates' cancelled on the day of the stag night, ladened with affected apologies, anaemic excuses and promises of future liver-damaging forays into public drunkenness. Yes, when the stag becomes the groom, he's bound to want to wee through a police station letter box. Obviously, that's going to happen.

But it's easier to cajole and seduce a disappointed 'buddy' than succumb to the inevitable truth: friendship doesn't matter to friends any more.

I awoke to scudding grey clouds. A fine drizzle carpeted the grass with opaque dew and it did not look like a good day to be dicking about on a golf course with a dodgy back. (We had arranged for a drunken round of 18, before heading off into our adolescent nobbing ground, Loughborough, for the obligatory spiced ethnic food and fizzy lager. All of us, that is, not just seven that made it.)

But, buoyed by the promise of seeing several friends that I had either gone months without seeing or lost contact with altogether, I trudged into what promised to be a day and a night of laddishness, japes and casual innuendo.

As soon as I arrived, I was greeted by the stag, who cheerily informed me that one of our oldest friends was not attending. He had a job interview. On Monday.

Not having been to a huge amount, I'm not certain that job interviews usually give such short notice. It would prove counterproductive to choose an employee on the basis of their speed of preparation; you may as well organise a candidate footrace, whereby the victor takes the job, leaving fellow applicants flailing in his dusty wake as they limp to the the job centre and limber up for the next round of interviews.

This would not be a productive means of appointment, but could go some way to explaining how Seb Coe managed to hurdle his way onto the Olympics Committee. I digress.

I have no doubt that our friend had an interview the coming Monday and so deemed drinking his own body weight in cider before boarding a freightship to Macau to be unsympathetic to his job prospects.

However, I find it hard to shallow that he was only informed, with staggering inconvenience, of said interview on the morning of the stag do. It's just that such a short-noticed pull-out would give the stag very little space to ruminate on what a shower of shite his friend was, for fear of ruining what is supposed to be his last taste of the single life.

Another, even closer friend didn't even manage to muster an external or prior commitment as he bowed disgracefully out of proceedings. He "would, but [was] absolutely knackered". There are several responses to that. "Well, sleep in tomorrow then," would have sufficed. As would, "I don't really think that's a legitimate reason for not showing your support in my last official night of single life. I will interpret this either as a rebuffal of our long and dear (at least to me) friendship or a tacit disapproval as to my choice of bride and course in life." Equally effective would have been a curt, "So, what?"

There are certain occasions that 'friends' can, I believe, legitimately duck out of, if they genuinely have a more important task to be performing. Birthdays are one.

It might seem impolite to ditch your friend amid the mountains of wrapping paper and cards from confused relatives; but in reality your friend wont mind. He will (hopefully) have a few more birthdays in his life, some of which you wont be able to think of an excuse to miss.

Assuming you've not been at the Liza Minelli book of commitment, you only get married once. One ceremony, one engagement, one preparation and one stag-do per lifetime. So friends, who either wish to be considered as such or believe that in this ever accelerating and increasingly superficial world of Facebook, mobile phone rejections and disparate personal encounters, there needs to be some things that actually mean something, should make a cocking effort.

I'm struggling to remember a night when I was so depressed, save for the time Fabianne Way ignored me walking on my hands in a bid to impress her at her sixth birthday party, so I just sat cross-legged in the corner of the bouncy castle and wept hot, salty tears into my Strawberry jelly and ice-cream. I was also six at the time, before you ask.

When did life get in the way of relationships? It can't have happened immediately upon leaving college/school/the dole queue. Every cancelled night out, every last minute text explaining your recently installed headache, every time you favour a night in front of the telly instead of a night nourishing the acquaintances that nourished you when you were growing up, unencumbered by dress-down Fridays and council tax bills - every time you choose convenience over friendship, you miss out.

Friends can inspire, infuriate and motivate you. You have to listen to your stupid head all day long. You have every opportunity to say what you think throughout the long computer days and TV-dinner nights, but you never have as good a chance to listen as when you are with like-minded individuals. Friends, to you and me.

So put down your pen, stop watching that sixty-fifth series of Grand Designs (you'll never afford it anyway) and go and see someone, talk to them, laugh with them, discuss the last series of Grand Designs with them, if you must. But most of all, please, let them mean something to you. Because, if last Saturday is indicative of the state of our friendships, you've already started meaning a little less to them.